Bayesian spiking neurons i: Inference

  • Authors:
  • Sophie Deneve

  • Affiliations:
  • Group for Neural Theory, Département d'Etudes Cognitives, Ecole Normale Supérieure, Collège de France, 75005 Paris, France sophie.deneve@ens.fr

  • Venue:
  • Neural Computation
  • Year:
  • 2008

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Abstract

We show that the dynamics of spiking neurons can be interpreted as a form of Bayesian inference in time. Neurons that optimally integrate evidence about events in the external world exhibit properties similar to leaky integrate-and-fire neurons with spike-dependent adaptation and maximally respond to fluctuations of their input. Spikes signal the occurrence of new information---what cannot be predicted from the past activity. As a result, firing statistics are close to Poisson, albeit providing a deterministic representation of probabilities.